To this day, youâ€™ll hear people say that the film Psycho has left them permanently afraid to take showers, or that theyâ€™re still terrified of the ocean because of Jaws. But no tale of terror has made a longer-lasting impression on American minds than the New Testamentâ€™s Book of Revelation. Nearly 2,000 years after John of Patmos penned this weighty prophecy of cataclysm and deliverance, adherents continue to anticipate the day of reckoning, simultaneously haunted by the fear of global demolition and elated by the promise of salvation.

Thereâ€™s a strong case for the idea that Revelationâ€™s Armageddon predictions were never intended for the present dayâ€”rather, Johnâ€™s writing was very much a piece for its time: a redemption song for persecuted Christians awaiting the fall of an oppressive Roman Empire. Among the factors supporting this view are the textâ€™s statements that its prophecies â€œmust shortly come to passâ€ and the fact that the Hebrew transliteration of the Roman Emperor Neroâ€™s Greek name, Neron Kaiser, adds to 666. (This, of course, is the number of an acutely ill-mannered beast in The Book of Revelation who enslaves humanity before being cast into a lake of fire.) The Roman Catholic Church and most Bible scholars contend that Nero, who was known for his brutal persecution and torture of Christians during or shortly before the writing of Revelation, was the very beast to which John referred. To avoid further persecution, John is said to have put Neroâ€™s name in code rather than stating it outright.

The story adds up, but the majority of Americans ainâ€™t buyinâ€™ it. According to a 2002 TIME/CNN poll, 59 percent of the people in our nation believe that The Book of Revelationâ€™s predictions will come true in the future. Various believers have fingered the likes of Ronald Wilson Reagan and barcode inventor George Joseph Laurerâ€”both of whose first, middle and last names contain six lettersâ€”as the beast. Another theory holds that the beast is the Internet: The Hebrew equivalent of the letter W has a numerical value of 6; thus, www = 666.

Like cockroaches crawling on after a nuclear holocaust, doomsday predictions continue to circulate in spite of the fact that one apocalyptic prophecy after another has bombed miserably. Itâ€™s no stretch at all to say we could easily fill this entire article exclusively with failed apocalyptic prophecies. (See bible.ca/pre-date-setters.htm.) Especially deserving of mention here are the Jehovahâ€™s Witnesses, who, as of this writing, have made a total of nine incorrect end-of-the-world forecasts. No less memorable were the Y2K panic or, less whimsically, the actions of apocalypse cults such as The Manson Family, The Branch Davidians and The Order of the Solar Temple, which stand as grim warnings of the extremes to which End Times beliefs can be taken.

Our fascination with the apocalypse (from the Greek ApokÃ¡lypsis: â€œrevelationâ€ or â€œlifting of the veilâ€) is, of course, inextricably tied to religion. (The concept can be traced back to ancient Persiaâ€™s Zoroastrian religion. End Times themes also appear in the Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, BahÃ¡’Ã­ and, of course, Christian faiths.) But at this point, the â€œend of the worldâ€ meme has saturated our civilization so thoroughly that even nonreligious people embrace Judgment Day predictions like diet crazes. The movie 2012 made $225 million during its first weekend, ultimately grossing more than $769 million worldwide, and there are more than 200 books about the 2012 prophecy on Amazon.com. The popularity of such apocalyptic literature as Cormac McCarthyâ€™s The Road and Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkinsâ€™ Left Behind series stands as further testament to the enduring hold that eschatological ideas have on mass consciousness, as does the publicâ€™s undying interest Nostradamus, alien invaders, the New World Order, etc. The data is in: America hearts the apocalypse.

Black Hole Sun

The most popular doomsday forecast of the day is, of course, the 2012 prophecy. As this tale goes, December 21, 2012 will be the date of the worst pre-Christmas frenzy ever: Humanity will meet its doom, and lo, there shall be much pooping of pants and overturning of buses. A New Age remix of this prophecy holds that Winter Solstice of 2012 will not mark the annihilation of the human race, but rather the arrival of a paradigm shift that will radically alter life on Earth for the better.

The 2012 prophecy supposedly comes to us from the ancient Mayans: The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar (often called the Mayan Long Count Calendar) is said to end on the Gregorian date of 12/21/12, which has been interpreted to mean that its makers believed the world was going to end at that time. Along with the movie 2012, predictions generated by the computer programs Timewave Zero and the Web Bot are helping promote anticipation of the end of the world on 12/21/12: Through means unrelated to the Mesoamerican Calendar, both of these programs have determined that massive and possibly catastrophic changes for the planet will take place in 2012. The ways in which Timewave Zeroâ€™s predictions intersect with the end of the Long Count Calendar are especially noteworthy: By using a numerologicalÂ formula (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerology) designed to calculate the ebb and flow of â€œnoveltyâ€Â (defined in this context as increase in the universeâ€™s organized complexity), Timewave Zero inventor Terence McKenna (1946-2000) arrived at the conclusion that the most novel event in human history will occur onâ€”yesâ€”December 21, 2012.

Many experts on Mayan culture insist that the ancient Mayans never foretold any sort of world change in 2012. Rather, they claim that 12/21/12 is merely the day when the current cycle of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar (often called the Mayan Long Count Calendar) will end, only to be replaced by a new cycle. Mayan archaeologist David Freidel likens the end of this cycle of the Long Count Calendar to the moment when an odometer reaches zero and begins again. Mayan elder Apolinario Chile Pixtun and Mexican archaeologist Guillermo Bernal have both stated that the apocalypseâ€”a distinctly Western conceptâ€”played no part in classic Mayan thought, and Mayan scholar Mark Van Stone has asserted that â€œthe notion of a â€˜Great Cycleâ€™ coming to an end is completely a modern invention.â€ The claim that the ancient Mayans did not expect the world to end in 2012 is backed up by the fact that many of their prophecies foretell events far beyond that year. (One is set in the year 4772 A.D.)

Nonetheless, a good catastrophic forecast is too alluring for the public to resist. The Web teems with theories as to how the world will be destroyed in 2012: At 11:11 Universal Time, the sun will align with a black hole at the center of the Milky Way, bringing calamitous results; geomagnetic reversal (perhaps caused by a solar flare) will cause earthquakes, huge tsunamis and other such catastrophes; a planet called Nibiru (or Planet X) will collide with the Earth; there will be a new Ice Age; an explosion of gravity will pull the planet to the center of the galaxy, etc. (NASA refutesÂ many of the most common 2012 doomsday theories on its Web site.

Nancy Lieder, founder of the website Zeta Talk, is the woman who first proposed one of the most widespread 2012 catastrophe scenarios: that of a hypothetical planet called Nibiru smashing into the earth. (The name Nibiru had previously appeared in the works of author Zecharia Sitchin, but Sitchin denies any connection between his writings and Liederâ€™s apocalyptic ideas.) To state the matter bluntly, Lieder is a lady who appears to have taken the brown acid: She claims to have an implant in her brain that allows her to receive messages from a star system called Zeta Reticuli and to have had encounters with aliens to whom she has given names like Slinky Man, Chicken Man, Bean Bag Man, Octopus Man and Pumpkinhead Zeta. She also once wrote at her Web site that when she reached into a cardboard box to find a piece of Starburst candy that was not individually wrapped in wax paper, she took it as a message from extraterrestrials to quit her job and move to Wisconsin.

On June 1, 2009â€”nearly half a year before the release of the movie 2012â€”NASA Astrobiology Institute Senior Scientist David Morrison stated that the website “Ask An Astrobiologistâ€œ had received nearly a thousand questions about Nibiru and 2012. Morrison claims to receive between 20 and 25 e-mails each week concerning Nibiruâ€™s imminent arrival. Some such e-mails express fear and panic, and others accuse Morrison of being a part of a conspiracy to bury the truth about the coming apocalypse.

You Say You Want a Revelation

Itâ€™s not surprising that the release of the film 2012 last year coincided with the fact that our nation was enduring the direst economic conditions itâ€™s seen since the Great Depression. As Michael Molcher, editor of the magazine The End is Nigh, told BBC News Magazine in 2008, â€œWhat you get during times of particular discontent or war or famine or during general bad times is a rise in apocalyptic preaching and ideas.â€ Lending credence to that notion, Veronica Tonay, Ph.D., a licensed therapist and psychology teacher at UCSC, states that when her former UC Santa Cruz colleague Frank Barron (1922-2002) conducted studies about peopleâ€™s end-of-the-world dreams, he found there was an increase in such dreams during the â€™70s and â€™80s, when fear of nuclear war was at a height.

Tonay notes that the publicâ€™s fascination with the apocalypse moves in cycles. The last spike in apocalyptic interest, she says, began at the turn of the millennium. â€œAlthough it may not seem like it to us, weâ€™re still pretty close to the year 2000,â€ she offers. â€œIt seems like at times of the cyclical change, all these millennial cults will pop up, and this idea that weâ€™d better prepare for the end of time will come. Weâ€™re in one of those right now.â€

With its oil spills, devastating natural disasters, economic hardships and threats of terrorism, global warming, fatal disease, etc. the present era offers no shortage of signs that â€œthe end is nigh.â€ However,Â writer and scientific researcher David Jay BrownÂ believes that similar things can be said of any era. â€œDuring every period of history, there have always been people proclaiming that the end is just around the corner,â€ he states. â€œNow, whatâ€™s really interesting is that since the beginning of history, people have also been claiming that the beginning is near, that the illuminated New Age is coming.â€

Brown, who explores this subject extensively in his book Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, attributes this phenomenon primarily to a particular state of consciousness rather than to external conditions. â€œI think that it always appears that way if youâ€™re in that state of consciousness: Weâ€™re always on the brink of chaos and the end of the human species, and weâ€™re always on the brink of a new age, depending on how you look at it,â€ he ventures. â€œThereâ€™s never any kind of ultimate ending or ultimate beginning; I donâ€™t think you ever reach a time where we say, â€˜This is it.â€™ The universe is constantly evolving, changing, in flux. I think things have been getting worse and getting better for a long time, and those [apocalyptic] projections are just extensions of what weâ€™ve believed for a long time.â€

Tonay, too, sees preoccupation with the end of the world as the externalization of internal processesâ€”specifically, a reaction to fear of figurative rather than literal death. â€œWhen people go through really major changes, they often start to have dreams, for instance, of the end of the world,â€ she explains. â€œItâ€™s almost as though thereâ€™s so much change happening that the old self has died away. Everything the person has known has been obliterated, and they donâ€™t yet see who theyâ€™re becoming.â€

If apocalyptic ideas are primarily expressions of internal change, then the present popularity of such themes suggests that at the moment, a great many people are going through major personal changes simultaneously. In explanation of this, Tonay points to the recession that began in the United States in late 2007. â€œFor many people, the idea of success was to make a whole lot of money,â€ she points out. â€œIf you build your life on that foundation, then youâ€™re very vulnerable, because itâ€™s an external foundation, and it can always be shaken. Many of us donâ€™t know what to believe in anymore. [Weâ€™re] losing our sense of whatâ€™s of value and feel shaky and insecure.â€

At the same time that apocalyptic imagery reflects this instability, it is also telling of our hope for transformation. Our dissatisfaction with modern life, our disconnection from nature and from one another, fills us with the desire to tear it all down and start fresh. Tonay notes that our collective hope for societal transformation can be seen in another theme currently prevalent in popular culture: that of finding â€œa new world somewhere out in space, which is [symbolic of] the far unconscious.â€ Citing the film Avatar as an example, she adds, â€œAlong with all that destruction, there is the creation of something new, or the finding of what has maybe always been there, but we didnâ€™t see it.â€

If, as Tonay and Brownâ€™s statements suggest, the concept of impending world destruction goes hand-in-hand with that of the imminent discovery or creation of a new world, then perhaps this says something about the power of human perception to make things appear positive or negative and/or about the choices available to us as co-creators of this planetâ€™s history.

In the early â€™80s, when Prince vowed to party his ass off before the world ended in 1999, he helped set the tone for a decade steeped in cocaine abuse, material excess and self-interest. Here at the start of the â€™10s, it might be useful to view the prophecy that 12/21/12 will bring the end of the human raceâ€”or, as the New Age version has it, the dawn of a more enlightened eraâ€”as a modern answer to â€œ1999â€: an anthem urging us to adopt saner values and practices as an alternative to self-annihilation.

That said, things are seldom as clear-cut in reality as they are in mythology. Rather than becoming a paradise or a wasteland on a specific date, our planet is likely to continue displaying aspects of both. As Brown puts it, â€œThereâ€™s always going to be a mix of light and darkness. It seems like right now, the light is getting brighter, and the dark is getting darker. And it may continue that way. It just may be part of the laws of physics, Yin and Yang, that there are always positive and negative forces. It may be that everything seems like itâ€™s on the brink of chaos or the brink of a new order, but really, it just always stays perfectly balanced.â€

By now, everybody knows that there’s a big crowd of folks who think something really big is going to happen this year because the Mayan Calendar allegedly ended in 2012 â€” specifically December 21, 2012

Less well known amongst the masses that are vaguely familiar with the meme is the fact that psychedelic/cyberdelic philosopher Terence McKenna was the original primary source for this notion and for this particular date. (If my memory serves, Jose Arguelles â€” the recently deceased new age guru perhaps best known for 1987’s “Harmonic Convergence” â€” originally set a different date for this Mayan-influenced ending of all endings, but if you try to google for dataâ€¦ at least to the limits of my patienceâ€¦Â you’ll find that any notice of this is buried beneath the now unified meme that December 21 is the hot date with destiny.)

Both men envisioned not an apocalypse (as per the current dominant meme) but some sort of transmutation of the human condition (a positive apocalypse).Â While Arguelles’s perceptions were largely influenced by mystical esoterica, McKenna’s vision was much more a hybrid of the mystical and the technological.

Like Ray Kurzweil, McKenna foresaw a world in which technical evolution (he liked to use the word novelty) would keep doubling at an exponential rate until we would hit a singularity.Â Only McKenna originally envisioned this constant and ever-quicker exponential doubling not by charting technical evolution but by “channeling” the “logos” behind huge quantities of tryptamine hallucinogens in the Amazon.

In McKenna’s singularity, we would unite with “the logos,” after which all of human history and materiality itself would be seen platonically as an idea space and everything â€” including all proceeding time and human experience â€” would become, in some sense, our plaything. Â And this would happen on December 21, 2012.

While McKenna divined much of his theory from such mystical sources as the i Ching and ideas taken from psychedelic shamanism as practiced in the Amazon, he was also an astute student of developments in hard science, technology and culture and his sense of this drive towards the singularity was at least somewhat “grounded” in how he saw real material and cultural developments.

Thus, when McKenna described his upcoming singularity as a place where the boundary between the exterior and interior collapses and what you imagine “simply comes to be,” it was not just mystical intuition. He would also be following movements towards technologies that allow us to control other technologies with our minds, he would be getting excited about K. Eric Drexler’s prediction of molecular control of the structure of matter; and he would be thrilling to predictions of desktop manufacturing (If you put those three things together, you get something like a world where what you imagine “simply comes to be.).Â He also jumped on the Virtual Reality train in the early ’90s, as that would be a kind of ecology of mind where this vision would be even easier to realize.

McKenna’s technophilia â€” to the extend he was a technophile â€” was not without its ambiguities. He believed technological advance without the intervention of spiritual, psychedelic consciousness and values would be both ugly and lethal.

Still, it would probably be a mistake â€” one that seems to be made by many current McKenna-philes â€” to think that Terence would feel confident that this grand transmutation based, only in part, on the Mayan Calendar was going to occur on time despite the fact that the technological training wheels needed to boost us into this platonic state have not yet sufficiently developed (if ever).

McKenna never took his role as a prophet as seriously as some of his disciples now appear to.Â As a self-admitted â€œcarnival barkerâ€ (and how self righteous and humorless have we become that many reading this will find this reason to dismiss him entirely?), thereâ€™s a pretty good chance that he would have hopped aboard the 2012 circus for purposes of livelihood and as a context for spreading other aspects of his philosophy, and he probably would have been available to be propped up on a hemp-woven throne at the stroke of midnight at the 12.21.12 global rave, but I feel certain that he would have been much more surprised if December 21, 2012 turns out to be a day of magical transmutation than he would have been disappointed if it does not.

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